There is an ever-increasing demand for faster and better communication services and especially a need for improved quality of experience when downloading web content in a communication network.
For example, mobile communication becomes ubiquitous and besides telephony, mobile Internet traffic is continuously growing due to the technology that provides broadband data rates such as High Speed Downlink Packet Access, HSDPA, Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution, EDGE, and Long Term Evolution, LTE, on one hand and the growing number of mobile devices like tablets or smart phones that enable the usage of a tremendous number of Internet applications through the mobile access. Web browsing has been and remains a significant portion (around 30-40%) of the total mobile internet traffic. A known fact is that the users experience Quality of Experience, QoE, problems due to slow web page download times for mobile networks. The two main reasons for slower download performance compared to fixed broadband networks is the lower access rates and longer access latency. Thus, a number of solutions/technologies have been designed that can improve the performance for end-users for mobile networks. Some of them are based on server-related optimization, but most of them assume an intelligent proxy in the network.
The web optimization solutions may be grouped in two main categories: intrusive or non-intrusive. The former solutions are those that make modifications in the initial page. Such modifications may include:                Removing or correcting non-relevant or wrong data in the markup language.        In-lining all referred JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, files.        Replacing Uniform Resource Locators, URLs, to large objects with other smaller, compressed objects.        Filtering out advertisements.        
The non-intrusive solutions are those that do not make modifications in the actual page. Thus a non-intrusive solution does not degrade the page quality in any way. Examples for non-intrusive web optimization solutions are:                Compress the content.        Cache the content at a proxy server.        Pre-fetching some content to a local cache of a User Equipment, UE.        
Advertisements seem to be representing one of the major problems for large web page downloads. This is partly because they cannot be cached; either because a server indication, or simply because they are not likely to be requested multiple times for the same user. Also, the structure of the advertisements is not optimized for short download times, containing a lot of local queries for client state and history, and actions based on those, resulting in large chains of request-reply patterns that cannot be parallelized. Reducing the time for ad downloads would generally result in a significant reduction of the overall web page downloads.
The simple non-intrusive methods like caching or content pre-fetching has turned out to have limited benefit due to the high share of dynamic content in the web pages. Advertisements, for example, are mostly dynamic and non-cacheable. The non-intrusive methods in general cannot solve the problem related to small access bandwidth.
The current intrusive methods are designed to decrease the data volume to be transferred and thus offer in principle a good solution for the bottleneck capacity problem. Filtering out ads at the proxy may be doable for example in the same way currently some browser plug-ins do it, i.e., based on some black-list that may be continuously updated based on observations. The proxy then would reply e.g., with a ‘No content’ reply to such requests. The impact on the downloaded page would be that some parts of the page would remain ‘blank’. However, one problem with this ad filtering and other intrusive methods is the legacy impact. The subscribers will not get the same content as the one targeted by the portal owner which would jeopardize business expectations.
Reference [1] relates to distribution and targeting of advertising for mobile devices. Advertisements are selected according to user profiles and selected advertisements may be downloaded offline to mobile devices and stored. Content may be separately provided to the mobile device. Each content may be associated with a content header containing requirements or restrictions regarding the advertisement that may be shown in association with the selected content.
Reference [2] relates to on-the-fly manipulation of advertisements. The method involves analyzing the content of the traffic directed towards or away from a user, and manipulation of the advertisements displayed to the user. The manipulation includes removal of existing ads, addition of new ads, or replacing existing ads with new ads based on the analysis of the content of the traffic.
There is thus a general demand for an improved way of handling ‘digital’ advertisements in a communication network.